SECTION 13 - Cylindrical Packing.
(Covers: Introduction, Data Input, Obtaining practically appropriate solutions, Cylindrical items and the Linkfile)
The ability to input details of both Cubic and Cylindrical items is a feature of this release and this section of the manual considers how this should be done in order to obtain the types of packing that meets your practical needs. It should be emphasized that this work is ongoing and user feedback on facilities they would like to see incorporated would be much appreciated.
Also, if reading this Section from a printed manual you might wish to reference the electronic version within the software application to see if changes have been incorporated following manual printing.
An example of the type of solution you can obtain is shown below:
Obviously such a complex packing can be output for loading purposes as a series of load plans and picking lists for sections of the container.
When entering data on cargo items into the main cargo input screen you have available a tick-box which is available to you in instances where the length and width of the item are the same so that the cylindrical nature of the item can be specified:
Having done so you may also need to make some changes to the characteristics of the item such as those indicated below:
In the container load shown above the various cylindrical items are all required to be placed on the floor of the container and can be loaded 2, 3 or 4 units high depending upon their individual characteristics. What is important, and is the subject of the paragraphs below, is that settings for Item Characteristics and/or Packing Priorities / Packing Rules result in solutions that meet the practical requirements of your cargo set.
13.3 Obtaining practically appropriate solutions.
In practice several different types of solution might be valid depending upon the characteristics of the items being packed.
The full container load shown earlier is, in our experience, the most usual type of load encountered. Cylindrical items are NOT mixed with no-cylindrical ones (all the cylinders are defined as being on the container floor, a number of units high, and having no other case types - cylindrical or otherwise - on top).
However one might wish to obtain any of the 3 solutions shown below:
 |
 |
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| A. | B. | C. |
To obtain solutions of the type shown in A. above one needs to ensure that all the rectangular cargo is packed first before attempting to pack cylindrical items. This could be done by packing all the rectangular items first and then using the 'Add Cargo' option to add-in the cylindrical items. Alternatively one could specify that all the rectangular cargo was of priority 1 and that cylindrical items were of priority 2 and load the cargo strictly according to priorities.
To obtain solutions of the type shown in B. above (should this be a real requirement - we think not!), then the reverse of the procedure discussed for diagram A. can be adopted. If the cylinders are set to be 'on-floor', and other box types are allowed on top, and the boxes are not set as floor based then this type of will be automatically be obtained.
As previously discussed we believe that the most usual requirement is as shown in C. above, and as adopted in the fully loaded container shown at the start of this manual section. The cylindrical items should be set 'on-floor and no other case types on top'.
Once again this is a relatively new feature of the software and feedback on practical needs would be much appreciated.
13.4 Cylindrical Items and the Linkfile.
As is described in Appendix 3.8 the format for the Linkfile has been extended to deal with Cylindrical Items in a manner which is also compatible with previous format Linkfiles. An additional single parameter may be specified as the last entry on a line as 0 or 1 and this will define the type of item - cubic or cylindrical.